Nostalgics and powerless: city life, photography’s
surveillance and the influence of Foucault∗
Margarida Medeiros
Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Índice
1 Photography and the Foucault’s heritage
1
2 Beyond Foucault
3
3 Image and Self: the contribution of
6
Donald Winnicot
4 Works cited
12
1
Photography and the
Foucault’s heritage
Photography’s theory and criticism has been
dominated, in the last 3 decades, by the
reflection about ideological mechanisms of
image production and the power they serve.
Some of the most interesting approaches, in
this context, are Alan Sekula (1989), Victor Burgin(1982) and John Tagg(1988). This
interest in ideological and political axes of
photography comes, as we can see, mainly
from an anglo-american context, and its big
theoretical influence are the works of Michel
Foucault, mainly his widely spread books
“Discipline and Punish” (1975) and “The archeology of knowledge” (1969). Curiously,
∗
Presentation at “International conferemce “Photography and the City”, Dublin, Bill Clinton Institute/UDC, 30.6.2006
in French theory of photography this influence is almost completely absent1 .
Foucault analyses in “Discipline and Punish” the Panoptic model of prision, designed by the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham
(1791) and he ties it to the rise of what he
calls the disciplinary dispositive. The influence of Foucault lays in part upon this
work, leading to an approach between what
Foucault calls the “disciplinary mechanism”,
or “the panoptical politics” and photography
mechanisms and uses.
Foucault analyses along his various works
the rise of institutional organization and of
its tools, and shows how hospitals, schools, prisons come from a new order and find
a support in the new scientific discourse,
which settle in powers of observation its
most desirable tool. Discipline was born,
Foucault concludes, from “Lightning” and
French Revolution.
Photography is invented in a such epistemological context, faced with realism and
naturalism in the arts, at the same time that
the positivist philosophy is being stated. As a
technology that reproduces perceived image
1
Cf. Ph. Dubois (1992), Frade(1993), JM.Shaeffer, (1987), F. Brunet (2005), A. Rouillé
(2005).
2
Margarida Medeiros
of objects, photography has become a companion of scientific observation in exact sciences like optics, botanic, chemistry, astronomy, geography, which are constructed upon laboratory and naturalistic observation. 1839, the official year of the invention
of photography, is also the year of Darwin
Beagle’s Diary publication, and one of the
continuing publication of “Positive Science”
(1832-40) by August Comte. As Samuel
Rodhie as already pointed out, “the visual
and the directed observed challenged conventions, confronted speculation with natural science”, having, because of that, “a disruptive effect in contemporary knowledge”2 .
Talbot, one of the pioneers, is mainly in
love for botanic, chemistry, and maths. In
the milliards of letters he left, passion for botanic and chemistry are really dominant, and
plants and flowers are some of the very first
to have is face turned into a photographic
drawing. In a letter to Sir John Herschel,
who was living at Cape Town, he suggests
him to put a gardener for his account to plant
for him some unknown specimens3 .
Photogenic drawings of leaves and flowers
was also the means by which he made his invention known, sending them to several botanists between 1830 and 1840. Following
Graham Smith, the first to see the samples
of the new art was Antonio Bertoloni, who
2
Sam Rodhie, “Geography, Photography,
The cinema/ Les Archives de la Planète”, in
http://www.haussite.net/haus.=/SCRIPT/txt2000/01/g
eoall.HTML, p.2
3
“I almost think of troubling you with a request
that through your means I may be enabled to employ some gardener or labouring man of intelligence
in collecting seeds and roots in different parts of the
Colony which I may afterwards hope to see flourishing in my greenhouse in Wiltshire”, 9.3.1833, in
http://www.foxtalbot.arts.gla.ac.uk.
by that time received about 36 photogenic
drawings; the idea, says Smith, was also to
show the interest of this process for botanists4 . Also Anna Atkins used photogenic
drawing for her book, published in 1843,
of british coast specimens, “British Algae:
Cyanotype impressions”.
Photography emerges then in public space
as a precious tool for scientific mind, in a
century strike by inventions such as electricity, gas, train, telephone, telegraph, just to
name a few that marked considerably the life
in big cities.
In 1859, writing about the “Salon des arts”
of Paris, Baudelaire battles the idea of an
artistic photography: photography must remain as a scientific and technical tool he
says, and an use of it as art just would satisfy obscene minds: “Poetry and progress
are two ambitious that hate each other with
an instinctive hate, and, when they meet in
the same way, is necessary that one serves
the other” 5 . Baudelaire only can see (and accept) photography as observational realism.
Scientific rationality, of the first half of xix
century and after, will spread over social and
institutional, as urban centers grow. Human
will be turned, definitely, as a scientific object, subject to the same observation and detail analyses, parallel to the social organization of the human environment.
Let’s see how Foucault describes the social and disciplinary discourses.
“A criterious observation of detail, and at
the same time a political sense of these little things to control and use by men grow in
classical age, bringing with them all a set of
techniques, all a set of procedures and kno4
5
Cf.Smith 2001
Baudelaire 1859: 255
www.bocc.ubi.pt
Nostalgics and powerless
wledge, descriptions, recipes and data. And
from these nothing, with no doubt, born the
modern humanism.” (Foucault 1975:123).
Nineteenth century saw also the rising of
detective science, with the same attention to
details (Conan Doyle, Edgar Poe), to the unsuspected evidence ou the too obvious mistery, as in “The stolen letter” by Edgar Poe.
Photography also assumes that detective
look to give full-details, mostly moved under the idea of inventory. This idea of detail is very close to some of the comments
about photography that were made in the beginnings. Talbot refers, in a comment to
Queen’s College of Oxford, which is part of
“The Pencil of Nature”:
“This magnifies the objects two or three times, and often discloses a multitude
of minute details, which were previously
unobserved and unsuspected. It frequently happens, moreover —and this is one
of the charms of photography — that the
operator himself discovers on examination, perhaps long afterwards, that he has
depicted many things he had no notion at
the time” (Talbot 1844, n.p.)
This one, photography, was seen as a privileged eye on the way to “discipline” daily
life experience. It serves to demonstrate, to
classify, to name, to fix, due to his “positive” nature. It is useful as a support for inventory and social surveillance, as different
authors have already and long ago underlined. So, when we read Foucault saying that
discipline:
“must become the tool of a permanent,
exhaustive and omnipresent surveillance,
able to turn everything visible under the condition of becoming itself invisible”; or that
www.bocc.ubi.pt
3
discipline “must be a glance without a face
which transforms the entire social field in
a visual-field (Foucault 1976: 215-216), it
would be necessary a great push not to recognize the parallel with the ways in which photography had been used and thought since
the very beginnings.
Photography criticism lead upon Foucault
analysis seems to be justified, and reminds
us an expression of Martin Kemp in a recent conference6 , who talks about “structural intuitions”, which work as shared ideas
by different areas (like science, art, politics,
philosophy). If we follow Kemp, we could
think about the idea of inventory as an appropriate term to name scientific and artistic
context of xix century first half, in particular inside british empiricism: nature’s inventory (botanic, zoology, paleolontology), social inventory (Comte, Marx), criminal inventory (Bertillon, Gall), histery inventory
(Charcot), art as inventory of nature (Courbet, Balzac). This inventory of reality is mixed with surveillance mechanisms that Foucault connects with discipline, because this
one, as he states, is not just a concept that
aims repression and order, but also productivity; and so, it can be also associated with techonologies of vision that since 1800’s produce the real look of things.
2
Beyond Foucault
However, the ideological role and power of
the photographic image shouldn’t contribute
to leave in the shadows the approach of individuals emotional relationship to photography, in an epoch where individual per6
Conference given at Montreal and published on
line, in www.hoa.ox.ac.uk/staff/kemp.htm, 22.6.2006
4
Margarida Medeiros
ception, intimacy and desire were as becoming subjects of theoretical approach. In this
sense go the works that have been published
more recently by Geoffrey Batchen7 .
Although photography was invented in a
scientific context, before its invention images were already being used for some decades as an illusion tool, namely in the context
of show business. Magic Lantern sessions
started in the seventeen century with Thomas
Walgensten (later commercialized by John
Reeves in 1663) and Daguerre’s diorama was
exhibited in Paris in 1822 for the first time
and in London one year later. So, by this
time, the process of human subject as a contemplative being, caught by the power of
imagery and whose attention is taken by images, had already started, and it had a whole
industry interested on it.
But these inventions were also described
in words like these: “Diorama is the most
perfect representation of nature: with its color combinations from transparency to opacity that vary in effects of light and shadow.”
8
So this observer who looks for reality, also
looks for illusion, someone divided between
the scientific positivism and the social practice and beliefs in occultism, spiritualism
and magical and illusionary phenomena9 , as
many authors have been more recently des7
Geoffrey Batchen, “Burning with Desire. . . ”,
1997; “Each wild idea. . . ”, 2001; “Forget me not”,
2004.
8
John Timbs, on ‘Diorama and Cosmorama’,in
his Curiosities of London, 1855, pp. 252-3, cit. In
http://www.midleykent.fsnet.co.uk/diorama/Diorama_
Timbs.htm, 30.5.2006
9
Cf. Tom Gunning, "Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations. . . "
Indiana University Press, 1995.; Laura Mulvey,
“Death 24x a Second. . . ” Reaktion Books, 2006
cribing it10 . It means that photography was
since its beginnings between naturalism and
magic, reality and fiction. But why such an
ambiguous ontology?
We must remember what kind of subject
who is at work in first half of xix century in
the city milieu.
During the XIX century, the process of a
weakened “self” had started, namely along
with Romanticism and the advance of scientific and institutional procedures that measure both Nature and Man, and mainly determined by big cities growing, like Paris and
London. “The Fall Of The Public Man” by
Richard Sennett, published in 1978, can be
an interesting tool to the understanding of
photography beyond a naturalistic frame and
panoptical politics, especially when photography’s marketing starts to grow within the
context of individual and familiar use.
Let’s see what Sennett tells us for a while.
According to him, the impact of city expansion in early xix century introduces a strong
change in public life. Until 1800’s, theatrical conventions are imposed to set limits to
identity, as the public man, corresponding in
certain ways to man in the Ancient Regime,
melts street and theatre into one. The idea of
“ emotion exhibit” is particularly important:
presenting an emotion towards the exterior is
a relation of non-representative drama, it is
set up to public convention and not to the private life of this “public persona”. Based on
objective conventions, communication in the
eighteen-century is theatrical in its essence;
the subject is signifying and not symbolic,
representing nothing but a mask.
10
Cf. Jennifer Green-Lewis 1996; Tom Gunning
1995; Helen Groth 2003; Geoffrey Batchen 1997 e
2001; Liz Wells 2005
www.bocc.ubi.pt
Nostalgics and powerless
Differently, the idea of an expressive appearance connected to our inner feelings
as a sign comes to take place during the
nineteen-century, and, connected with feelings of shame and fear of the public opinion,
appearance becomes an individual process.
“Bearing a secret” becomes extremely important to communication as the new “private” self takes the former place of the “public man”. Escape and compulsive intimacy
are therefore linked to the idea that feelings
shouldn’t be shown involuntary to others.
As Sennett describes, “the effort to penetrate into one’s defenses and force them to
communicate is immense, therefore the extreme importance of a simple expression of
an emotion, a sign.” (Sennett 1978:122).
According to Sennet, even fashion in the
nineteen-century becomes inexpressive and
extremely controlled, fearing the expression
of inner feelings, as we can find in Balzac’s
novels. Balzac talks about a gastronomy of
the eye.
“Madame de la Chanterie” is a story included in Balzac’s “L’envers de l’histoire
contemporaine” (1806-36), where the writer
describes a character that in order to change
a life of shame should start with the change
of his appearance, namely his wardrobe.
Mme de la Chanterie is an ex-aristocrat,
now living in social reclusion by renting out
rooms to some people that, like her, share a
“Christian Spirit”.
As our heroic character goes to see Mme
in order to rent himself a monastic bedroom,
she looks at him with contempt and informs that the room she has might not suit
him. . . But as the young man shows his interest in participating in the Christian life of
this group, he proofs himself capable as well
of sincere abnegation and, by doing so, will
www.bocc.ubi.pt
5
be fully accepted in the house. It is this
idea of sincerity that is new. Each mask is
a face (a symbol, according to Sennett) and
therefore each individual is a prisoner of his
own personality, turning impossible a stability and independence of personality. Therefore, a relation is produced between involuntary showing of personality and the instability and the immanence of feelings.
“As people’s personalities came to be seen
in their appearances”, Sennett says, “facts of
class and sex became matters of real anxiety”; so, “closely tied to a code of personality immanent in public appearances was a
desire to control these appearances through
increasing one’s consciousness of oneself”
(Sennett 1978:168). Therefore the strong
connection between the voyeur as a passive
character, hiding a secret, and the consequent
social anguish being produced by this fetish
(of the eye).
So, during the eighteen-hundreds, and
parallel to the moment when an external
and objective surveillance is starting to take
place in society, namely based on photographic records, there is an inner surveillance taking place as well, building a new
relation within the subject and his selfconscience11 .
The invention of a technique allowing re11
For more on the rise of the subjectivity and the
rising of self-awareness, see: Doris Kauffman, “Dreams and sel-conscienciousness/ From ame to moi to
le moi, in Lorraine Daston, Biographies of Scientific
objects, The Univ. of Chic. Press, 2000, pp. 67-86;
Fritz Breitaupt, “The invention Of Trauma in German
Romanticism”, in Critical Inquiry 32, aut 2005, pp.
77-101. As Breutaupt underlines, at the beginning
of 1800’s, “to observe one’s past means first of all
to frame the past within an observatory, within some
stable structure from which the past can be monitored,
repeated, tested.” (op.cit. p. 82)
6
alistic images to be produced is, therefore,
an extremely important response in a context
where identity is fluid and uncertain and lived in a frame of constant self-awareness.
But the most interesting contribution in
Sennett’s analyses for us to think the impact operated by photography in everyday
life would be yet another: the idea that, from
the nineteen-century on, man is in constant
re-examination towards his past, based on
his perception that action may exist before
conscience.
The autobiographical writings is a style
that seems to fit perfectly with this time
where “truth via introspection” is taking
form. This matches with a vision of the
present as shifting, fugacious: “in the past”,
Sennett argues, “one was “really alive” and if
one could make sense of the past, the confusion of one’s present life might be lessened”
(Sennett 1978: 168). For Sennett, psychoanalytic therapy, built on anamnesis, comes
out of this Victorian sense of nostalgia.
Photography is therefore contemporary to
this nostalgic movement of the self towards
its past, where personal history and the remembrance take place in the construction of
a self-made narcissism.
In Jean François Chévrier’s book “Proust
et la Photographie” the author makes reference to the importance of seeing as an observation of the other in Proust’s “A la recherche du temps perdu”. According to Chévrier, the description of the kind of seeing
helps to set the psychological construction of
the narrative – ‘at glance’ on the public promenade and ‘distant’, at the church, are such
examples.
Margarida Medeiros
3
Image and Self: the
contribution of Donald
Winnicot
Phtography possesses, since its beginnings,
some characteristics that must be understood
under certain concepts that come from individual psychology, as well as social and ideological analysis. The analysis of the rising
of the Self, as a concept which also contemporary of the medium seems to be an important one. As Alan Sekula already pointed out, “photography came to establish and
delimit the terrain of the other, to define the
generalized look — the tipology— and the
contingent instance of deviance and social
pathology"(Sekula 1988: 345). Although
this statement refers to institutional uses of
photography (in police departments, in phrenology, in anthropometry), it can be generalized to the system of relationships that urban
environment impresses in individuals.
In the forward he wrote to his album “The
pencil of nature” (1844), Talbot describes
the origins of his invention, connecting it
with the need to fix an experience of visual
perception, and the need to fix into images
the true experience of contemplation of the
world around him, so that he could store that
mental images and thoughts:
“And this led me to reflect on the inimitable beauty of the pictures of nature’s
painting which the glass lens of the Camera Obscura throws upon the paper in
its focus — fairy pictures, creations of a
moment, and destined as rapidly to fade
away.
It was during these thoughts that the idea
occurred me. . . how charming it would be
if it were possible to cause these natuwww.bocc.ubi.pt
Nostalgics and powerless
7
ral images to imprint themselves durably,
and remain fixed upon the paper!
And why should it not be possible? I asked myself”. (Talbot 1844, n.p.)
every embryo miner embarking for the
golden shore must have several portraits
taken to leave with his family and friends.”12
There is the nostalgia, that Sennett speaks about. Which also leads us trough other
interests of Talbot, dealing also with nostalgia: the deciphering of cuneiform and hieroglyphic writing. As we can expect, this
was one of the uses upon which Talbot, and
others (as Roger Fenton, under Talbot demand), lead photography. As Sennett argues,
and Walter Benjamin also pointed out, the
man of this secular city of xix century is tied
to images as a support of his identity. And
a simple calotype of a cuneiform fragment is
not just a photographic document; it is also
a support for a fragmented Self, an atomized
Self, living through a secular life. Archeological images are twice nostalgic: they reflect
a lost unity of the Self and a time that only
exists now as a fetish.
This nostalgic relation are very typical of
the expansion of daguerreotype, mainly in
United States, where studios multiplied in
the fifties, intensifying the production of portrait. In 1850 there were about 10.000 daguerreotypers in America. As we can infer
from an historical note published in 1896, in
McClure’s Magazine, daguerreotype had began an essential object between people’s relationship, an object which introduces a reparation in time and space separation, being
used as a continuity element in long separations or in death of relatives. In this newspaper, the author talks about the farewell of the
gold miners:
But this increment of portrait has also
enormous performative issues, because the
jornalist comments:
“And whether he was going across the
Isthmus or around the Horn, he must be
pictured with his entire kit-kettle, fryingpan, knife, fork, cup, pick-axe, shovel,
and the invariable two revolvers in his
belt. He must also carry with him pictures of parents, wife, children, and friends...” (Ibid.).
And portraits were made for both parts, as
the miner also carried family portraits, “destined to be his sole companions in his rough
mountain cabin, from which he would hardly
part for all the gold in California” (ib.)
Photography is so a kind of fetish, with
properties that transcend widely its eventual
materiality and which contribute, in a certain
way, for this last one can never be definitely
fixed.
But what seems central to us is this selfstructural support that emerges from photography, and which allows the subject to control the lost feeling that comes from the “private” society. The control given by visuality is by this way constructed in a polymorphic way: if one one hand positivism
comes tied with naturalistic representation,
allowing photography to be an observatory
tool, as we saw, on the other hand, portrait
12
“The discovery of gold in California was
a great boom to the daguerreotyper, as
www.bocc.ubi.pt
In McClure’s Magazine, Vol. 8, No. 1 (November 1896.), cit. in http://www.daguerre.org/resource/
texts/davis/davis.html, 18.6.2006
8
Margarida Medeiros
and private photography (family, traveling
and so on) encounters this new romantic subject, strike by inconstancy and fragility, by
the rising of the concept of “Self”, or “Ich”
with its need of “real things”. But this is possible too, because of the truly naturalism of
the image. Philip Hone writes in his diary:
Every object, however minute, is a perfect transcript of the thing itself; the hair
of the human head, the gravel on the roadside, the texture of a silk curtain, or the
shadow of the smaller leaf reflected upon
the wall, are all imprinted as carefully as
nature or art has created them in the objects transferred; and those things which
are invisible to the naked eye are rendered apparent by the help of a magnifying
glass.13
And in an account of daguerreotype invention, in Mac’Clure’Magazine of November 1896, Mr Davis quote, from a 1839’s
"Knickerbocker"/Washington Irving’s Magazine issue :
“Their exquisite perfection almost transcends the bounds of sober belief. Let
us endeavor to convey to the reader an
impression of their character. Let him
suppose himself standing in the middle
of Broadway, with a looking-glass held
perpendicularly in his hand, in which is
reflected the street, with all that therein
is, for two or three miles, taking in the
haziest distance. Then let him take the
glass into the house, and find the impression of the entire view, in the softest light
13
In The Diary of Philip Hone, 1828-1851
Ed. by Bayard Tuckerman (New York: Dodd,
Mead and Company, 1889) pp. 391-392.
http://www.daguerre.org/resource/texts/hone.html
and shade, vividly retained upon the surface. This is the daguerreotype. The views themselves are from the most interesting points of the French metropolis.
Who would throw up their business and
their dinners, on a voyage to see Paris or
London, when one can sit in an apartment
in New York and look at the streets, the
architectural wonders, and the busy life
of each crowded metropolis?”14
The popularization of daguerreotype and
calotype and in the fifties the glass plates
emerges in this nostalgic scene, once it can
helps denying the feel of the lost sense of reality. Photography analogical ontology makes possible to take it as a tool that helps
for mourning upon absence, as it can be
used as the desired object’s substitute; but
at the same time it can also work against
this, because of the intense visual proximity
between image and absent object, helps to
growing of the nostalgic and melancholic feeling, in the sense that Freud remarked. At
the same time as it can works as a support for
absence, it can also work against forgetting,
a process which is vital to our perceptionconscience system.
The rythm in the big city leads to a fragmentation of daily life, and makes the fugacity of perception impressions as a recorrent
theme: the public promenade is one of the
big cities figures, argued by Sennett as introducing the fugace glance, the ephemeral
social evenement — and intensely described
by Proust at the end of the century.
And this is one of the reasons of such a popular success of photography: what we cannot really see, because is moving fast, or be14
http://www.daguerre.org/resource/texts/davis/da
vis.html
www.bocc.ubi.pt
Nostalgics and powerless
cause it is too far, we can examine with delay in a photograph. For Chévrier, the will
of Proust in fixing images, in “revealing, illuminating impressions, is tied with his enchantment with shadow: forgetting as the
place of invisible movements of memory”.
That’s why, Chévrier argues, Combray sats
out of forgetting: because it is the illuminated scene of first separation drama (that of
the child who is going to sleep without having been kissed by its mother)15 .
At this point it will be useful to introduce some psychoanalytical concepts designed by Donald Winnicot. (Winnicot 1971:
13). Winnicot brought us the concept of
transicional object, an object which is manipulated in childhood (a bear, a swaddle, a
sheet) and which is invested with phantasy
and emotions related with an absent object.
They are not “internal objects” (which means
a mental concept) but “something one possesses” (1971: 9).
Winnicot argues that this transicional object, as an instrument that allows to supply an
absence by the means of a substitute, works
as an intermediate between what is subjectively and what is objectively perceived. And
it is in this context, of allucinate and illusionary repetition, that transitional object can
allow the elaboration of the absent — which
Freud already had associated with the FortDa game.
Nostalgia can be referred, upon Winnicot,
to the precarious relationship between subject and intimate representation of the lost
object (Winnicot: 1971: 23). It means that
this nostalgic feeling consists in some kind
of a fixing to a lost, from which the subject
15
Jean-François Chévrier, Proust et la Photographie, Paris, Éditions de l’Étoile, 1982, p.115
www.bocc.ubi.pt
9
doesn’t recover, and which regulates his relationship with external world and other people.
This seems to be what happened with photography: it seems to have come to encounter
this ‘Victorian sense of nostalgia’ which dominates life, mainly in big cities, since xix
century, becoming then a paradoxal object,
which functions at the same time as an intermediate for the subject to a reality each
day more shifting, and as an object that feeds the idea of a “truth retrospectively obtained”(Sennett: 53).
Maybe images are such transicional objects, that allow the subject to live between
the borderlines, mixing itself upon them,
denying loss and separation, allowing the allucination of reality.
To Winnicot, the sense of individual selfassurance comes from the possibility the
child can get of mirroring itself in the face or
faces of those who are around since its birth
— and, after Lacan, of recognizing its own
image in the mirror. 16
The impossibility of this mirroring act impeaches the maturing of the Self, namely the
increasing of the “reality” feelings: “Becoming real is more than existing; is to find out
16
Cf Jacques Lacan, “Le stade du Moi comme
formateur de la fonction du Je”(1949), in Écrits,
Paris, Seuil, 1972: L’assomption jubilatoire de
son image spéculaire par l’être encore plongé dans
l’impuissance motrice et la dépendance du nourrissage qu’est le petit homme à ce stade infans, nous paraîtra dès lors manifester en une
situation exemplaire la matrice symbolique où
le je se précipite en une forme primordiale,
avant qu’il ne s’objective dans la dialectique de
l’identification à l’autre et que le langage ne lui
restitue dans l’universel sa fonction de sujet.” In
http://perso.orange.fr/espace.freud/topos/psycha/psys
em/miroir.htm, p. 3. 20.6.2006.
10
Margarida Medeiros
a way to exist as an autonomous Self, and
have a Self in which to trust” 17
This conceptualization that refers to individual psyche should be calls back what Sennett called the “failure of the Self”, facing
the growing of big cities. For the big cities
become, since 1800’s, the space of the stranger, with thousands of unclassified individuals, with a new inform class, which will produce self-insecurity and incertainty.
In this sense, photography, portrait in particular, but also social and ethnographic documentalism that was incremented around
the 1870’s, will represent that mirror function, once “public space” no more exists. If,
upon Winnicot, the most important thing of
this image is its “response” side, it means,
the fact that it consists in other’s look devolution in which the child sees itself, photography can also be considered as means of
obtain some kind of “others” look: who sees
an image (of himself, of the world around,
of the other), sees also a glance over his own
Self.
The “production of the visible” by photography inventory of the real (Rouillé 2005)
would have then a sense: to give the subject a
place in an original mirror, because image is
always coming to and from the pre-verbal dimension. In the place of the modernist commonplace that “an image is more than thousand Words”, we should be saying that images are before thousands of words. . . Here is
at least one reason why text that surround
images in xix century photographic illustrated books are always so laconic and extremely technicians; they refer the conditions of
image production, they pay attention to details that show the superiority of image com17
Winnicot 1971: 117
paring with empirical look or they are limited to some kind of museographic note, in
which they describe the object we see. Image
is always before language.
But let’s return once more to Winnicot.
He displays 3 functions that are crucial to
the child’s development: 1) holding; 2) handling; 3) object presentation:
“A baby is held, and handled sactifactory,
and having this for granted he can face an
object not having his legitimate experience of omnipotence destroyed. The result can be the baby be able to use the
obejct, and feel that that object is a subjective object, created by himself” (Winnicot 1971: 112)
This theorization of Winnicot is also very
suggestive when we think of photography in
the 1800’s urban environment. Photography
emerges side by side of big industrial novelties, as one of its products and as one of its
supports. Georges Simmel, in “Metropolis
and Mental life”, the first chapter of his work
“The philosophy of money” (1903), underlined then the speed of stimuli in big metropoles as a conditioner of a new mode of thinking, of a new psychology:
“The psychological basis of the metropolitan type of individuality consists in
the intensification of nervous stimulation
which results from the swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli. Man is a differentiating creature.
His mind is stimulated by the difference
between a momentary impression and the
one which preceded it. Lasting impressions, impressions which differ only slightly from one another, impressions which
www.bocc.ubi.pt
Nostalgics and powerless
11
take a regular and habitual course and
show regular and habitual contrasts-all
these use up, so to speak, less consciousness than does the rapid crowding of
changing images, the sharp discontinuity
in the grasp of a single glance, and the
unexpectedness of onrushing impressions. These are the psychological conditions which the metropolis creates.” (Simmel 1903: 3)
templation is held as response to a life progressively centered in immanence (Sennett)
and, for that, more anxiousgenic.
The photographic image offers, finally,
what the metropolis man really needs: it can
be seen just as product of science and rationality, a scientific inventory of the appearance of the world, offering the reliability
that no one can find again in the constant
shift of daily life. As Talbot sustained:
This new psychology, Simmel argues, implies a constant intellectual response (a new
“organ”, according to him) and causes the
fragmentation of experience. It’s why Simmel begins his book with the statement that
“the deepest problems of modern life derive
from the claim of the individual to preserve
the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture,
and of the technique of life” (Simmel:1903:
1).
In this sense, and returning to Winnicot,
we should say that the man of the big city
has lost his sense of self-assurance (the holding and the handling) which allowed him
to face objects, because now he has to deal
with a permanent moving world, provoking
him impotence feelings and leading him to
loose a sense of intimate reality. As a response to this ephemeral life, photography offers the stability of a representation of the
real that we can handle or upon which we
can rest our eyes. It is in this stability offered by the mother’s gaze that Winnicot sets
the creative feeling. Photography allows holding and handling, even if any photographic
image is at sometime a mirror of death and
shall become a melancholic object. And we
now can say that a regressive desire of con-
“A picture, divested of the ideas which
accompany it, and considered only in its
ultimate nature, is but a succession or variety of stronger lights thrown upon one
part of the paper, and of deeper shadows
on another” (Talbot 1844: n.p.).
www.bocc.ubi.pt
This ‘positivist’ perspective as Talbot puts
it is very a convenient idea, because photography returns to the subjects such a meltingpot of feelings, that is always convenient to
keep some distance. . . . But it is just because
it goes much more over that scientific reception that photography became an object so
intensely discussed18 .
The influence of Michel Foucault in photography’s criticism is a very important one,
and has lead to very signifying writings,
some of them we shall reread and discuss;
but if we want to understand the success
18
For more and decisive texts on the paradoxally
nature of photography see the pioneering books of
Geoffrey Batchen, referred above. And also: Tom
Gunning, “Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations”, in Patrice Pietro, Fugitive Images, 1995; Marien
Mary Warner, Photography and Its Critics: A Cultural History, 1839-1900. (Cambridge Perspectives
on Photography) Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997;
Laura Mulvey, Death 24 x a Second/Stillness and the
moving image, London, Reaktion Books, 2006
12
Margarida Medeiros
of photography in the context of the new
cultural values (as nostalgia) and figures of
xix century, it doesn’t mean an antagonism
between the psychological and cultural approach and that which has been made systematically (in a more or less implicit mode)
between photography, discipline and ideological gaze. On the contrary, and I think my
research will lead me over that, we have to
think about photography as a wide discursive
formation, a field crossed by very different
forces and interests, one of the less important is not the relation between photography
and the rising of the nostalgic feeling.
4
Works cited
Balzac, H. (1806-1836), “Madame de La
Chanterie”, in L’envers de l’histoire
contemporaine. Paris: Flammarion.
Batchen, G. (1997), Burning with desire/The
conception of photography.
London/MA, The MitPress.
Batchen, G. (2001), Each Wild Idea/Writing.
Photography. History. London/MA,
The MitPress.
Baudelaire,C.(1859,1994), “Le public moderne et la photographie”, in Écrits sur
l’art. Paris: Gallimard.
Burgin, Victor (1982), Thinking photography. Manchester: MacMillan.
Chévrier, J.-F. (1982), Proust et la Photographie, Paris: Éd. de l’Étoile.
Crary, J. (1991), Techniques of the observer/On vision and modernity in xix century. London/MA, The MitPress.
Crary, J. (2001), Suspensions of perception.
London/MA, The MitPress.
Foucault, M. (1975), Surveiller et Punir. Paris: Gallimard.
Frade, P.M. (1993), Figuras do espanto. Lisboa: Asa.
Green-Lewis, J. (1996), Framing the Victorians/Photography and the culture of realism. Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ.
Press.
Groth, H. (2003), Victorian Photography
and Literary Nostalgia. Oxford:Ox.
Univ. Press.
Gunning, Tom (1995), "Phantom Images and
Modern Manifestations", in Patrice Petro, Fugitive Images. Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Marien, M. Warner (1997), Photography and
Its Critics: A Cultural History, 18391900. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1997.
Mulvey, Laura (2006), Death 24 x a Second(Stillness and the moving image.
London: Reaktion Books.
McClure’s Magazine, Vol.
8, No.
1 (November 1896.), via http://
www.daguerre.org/resource/texts/davis/
davis.html, 12/6/2006.
Nile’s National Register, Vol.
57 (28
September 1839) pg. 73, via http://
www.daguerre.org/resource/texts/davis/
davis.html, 12/6/2006.
Rouillé, A. (2005), La photographie. Paris:
Folio.
www.bocc.ubi.pt
Nostalgics and powerless
Schaaf, L. (2000), The phot. Art of Henry
Fox Talbot.Princ. /Ox., Princ. Univ.
Press.
Sekula, Alan (1989), “The Body and the Archive”. In Richard Bolton (ed.)The context of meaning. London/MA, The Mit
Press, 1990.
Sennett, R.(1978), The Fall of the public
man. New York: Vintage Books.
Simmel, G. (1903), “Metropolis and mental life”, in The philosophy of money.
http://www.scholars.nus.edu.sg/writing
/uwc2101d/metropolis.html, 14.6.2006.
Tagg, John (1988), The burden of representation. Manchester: MacMillan.
Talbot, W.H. F. (1800-1877), http://www.fox
talbot.arts.gla.ac.uk/corresp.
Talbot, W.H. F.(1844), The Pencil Of Nature.
New York: Da Capo Press.
The Diary of Philip Hone 1828-1851, Ed.
by Bayard Tuckerman (New York:
Dodd, Mead and Company, 1889) via
http://www.daguerre.org/resource/texts/
hone.html, 12/6/2006.
Timbs, J. (1855), Curiosities of London.
http://www.midleykent.fsnet.co.uk/dio
rama/Diorama_Timbs.htm, 30/5/06.
Winnicot, D. (1971, 1997), Playing and reality. NewYork and London: Routledge.
www.bocc.ubi.pt
13